See also: The Fried Food Finalists Coming to the State Fair of Texas 2012 The Amazing Sweets of the State Fair of Texas
They say everything is bigger in Texas, and whoever the hell they is has it right at least as far as corn-chip filled snacks go -- though that's probably not what they had in mind.
Where were we?
Oh, yeah, at this year's State Fair of Texas, Frito Lay will attempt to set a world record for largest Frito pie. The company announced the event to mark its 80th anniversary with a vague news release that instantly filled my head with questions like: Just how big this thing is going to be? How are they going to make it? Where was the world's second largest Frito pie constructed? Belgium? Burkina Faso? How do you decide if a record has been set if there is currently no record for world's largest plate of corn chips covered in cheese and chili?
Chris Kuechenmeister, a spokesman for Frito Lay, says his team worked together to come up with the idea. They figured they were working with one of the company's largest brands, so why not make the largest Frito pie, ever, at the largest state fair, ever?
Seriously, can you think of any reason?
After contacting Guinness World Records (the folks who scour the earth looking for important superlatives like "largest natural breasts" and "hairiest teenager") and determining that no record for largest Frito pie existed, the team got to work making up their own.
The Guinness folks assigned Michael Empric to the project. He's an adjudicator who helps determine what constitutes an initial record and whether an existing record has been broken. I asked Empric how I could go about setting my own world record for, say ... largest deviled egg? I was quickly shot down.
Empric told me deviled eggs were a bad idea because they could only be as big as the largest egg in existence, so once the record is set, it can never be broken. He said if I wanted to work with deviled eggs I'd have to come up with the largest serving of deviled eggs, or the most deviled eggs made in an hour. Both of those sounded like too much work so I got back to asking him about Frito pie.
To set the record, the Frito folks will have to build a finished product that weighs in at around 1,200 pounds. Empric says the goal is based on previous food records like largest taco (1,654 pounds) and largest hamburger patty (6,040 pounds). Kuechenmeister's team is still working on details such as the container the record breaking dish will be made in and the amount of chili, chips and cheese they'll need, but they promise the finished product will yield more than 5,000 samples for fair-goers.
This is your chance to be a part of history, people. The Frito folks will commence construction at 10 a.m. October 1. Come hungry, and maybe you can be part of the follow-up record setting event -- the world's largest synchronized belch.
See also: The Fried Food Finalists Coming to the State Fair of Texas 2012 The Amazing Sweets of the State Fair of Texas
